The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, January 26, 2015

India is now the belle of the ball, as most of the world and Asian
regional powers make pilgrimages to New Delhi to flatter and flirt with India’s
dynamic Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

Modi and India come with a certain amount of unpleasant baggage, which their suitors do their best to ignore.Modi himself is an unrepentant Hindutva cultural chauvinistwhose attitudes toward Muslims (and
convincing circumstantial evidence of his involvement in an anti-Muslim pogrom
in Gujarat—so convincing, in fact, he was previously banned from the United
States) trend toward the fascistic.

China today lodged a protest with Tokyo after Japan's
foreign minister was quoted as saying that Arunachal Pradesh was "India's
territory".

Japan's Sankei
Shimbun, a conservative daily, quoted Fumio Kishida as having made the
remarks in New Delhi on Saturday.

Japan played down the issue today, saying it could not
confirm Kishida's reported remarks. It added that it hoped India and China
could resolve their border dispute peacefully.

Kishida's reported remarks drew an angry response from
China, which called on Tokyo to "understand the sensitivity of the
Sino-India boundary issue".

A Japanese foreign ministry spokesperson said "the
statement was made considering the reality that Arunachal Pradesh state is
basically in reality controlled by India and that China and India are
continuing negotiations over the border dispute".

China disputes the entire territory of Arunachal, calling it
south Tibet, especially Tawang, a key site for Tibetan Buddhism. The historic
town briefly fell into Chinese hands during their 1962 war before Beijing
retreated.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry backtracked expeditiously, indicating that
Kishida’s remarks were perhaps a slip of the tongue and not meant to inject
Japan into the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

Ever since Prime Minister Abe returned to office with an India-centric
Asian policy, yearnings have been expressed that Japan might openly side with
India on the Arunachal Pradesh issue.The PRC, was extremely leery of previous PM Manmohan Singh and his overt
diplomatic and emotional tilt toward Japan and, with good reason, has expected
the current officeholder, Narendra Modi, to play off China, Russia, and the
United States in a more pragmatic manner.

Modi will certainly keep the PRC off balance.President Obama’s
decision to accept Prime Minister Modhi’s invitation to attend the Republic Day
extravaganza further buttressed Modi’s prestige and popularity within India and
elicited a wave of “Mobama” triumphalism in the press, much to China’s
discomfiture.

Modi averred to President Obama that he was angry and disappointed with the PRC over alleged border perfidy in Ladakh in 2014 at the time of Xi Jinping's visit, and Modi endorsed the US position on the South China Sea and efforts to upgrade the US-Japan-India-Australia security quadrilateral.

In the matter of the "border" incident (there is no accepted border or even a mutually understood Line of Control; there is an overlapping 20-kilometer wide band in which Indian and PRC local forces work within ill-defined "Lines of Perception" and engage in persistent envelope-pushing, patrolling, hut construction, and road-building that make it easy for either side to foment an incident) in the barren wastes of Ladakh, perhaps Xi Jinping thought he could get Sino-Indian relations on a solid footing by humiliating Modi before his army and his nation with a gratuitous provocation.

An equally plausible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable PRC affront--which recapitulated a previous incident in Ladakh that similarly overshadowed the decidedly unmartial technocrat Li Keqiang's state visit in 2013--was that it was engineered by hardliners in the Indian security establishment (who exhaustively backgrounded, briefed, and ballyhoo'd the incident to the receptive Indian press during Xi's visit) to balk PRC attempts to improve relations and negotiate the borders issue, and Modi grasped the opportunity to wrongfoot the economically and strategically overbearing PRC in order to advance his strategic agenda

In this case, perhaps Modi was putting the incident to further good use to tell President Obama exactly what he wanted to hear, provide a compelling narrative to underpin the important Sino-US relationship, and help extract various economic and security benefits, including the heightened intelligence cooperation that advocates of the US-Indian security alliance are promoting. Per the Indian Express (which also revealed in passing that, in addition to the canonical "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing arrangement, the US has also midwifed "Nine Eyes" and "Fourteen Eyes" intel clubs in Europe in addition to pacts with Japan and South Korea), Indian intelligence priorities will include a) Pakistan b) China c) keeping the US at arms-length, not necessarily in that order:The pact would enable India access to encrypted digital traffic its intelligence services are now unable to decipher. It would also make state-of-the-art western espionage technology available to the Directorate of Military Intelligence and the National Technical Research Organization...The US has provided a growing volume of information on planned attacks by Pakistan-based groups--helping India pre-empt at least two attacks on diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan.

....

There are, sources said, several formidable challenges to be overcome before India can begin purchasing cutting edge digital intelligence technologies from the US. For example, fearful that equipment can be used to eavesdrop on sensitive information, India insists on domestic security certification for purchases. However, no Indian firm currently certifies EAL7+, the most stringent standard for digital security.

...

Fears also exist that an intelligence-sharing agreement might allow penetration of its own secrets. The Vajpayee government (the first BJP national government--ed.) which saw the first warming in ties with the US, was deeply embarrassed by the disclosure that the US had recruited Research and Analysis Wing officer Rabinder Sing...

It remains to be seen who comes out ahead in the US-India tango and, in particular, how deep Modi is willing to follow the US down the China-containment rabbit hole. Modi's statements on China policy are, for the time being, cost-free lip service and in the end, Modi
played true to independent form in the matter of climate change by publicly and bluntly rejecting President Obama’s call to
limit India’s greenhouse gas emissions.

For the PRC, an important area of anxiety is Arunachal Pradesh and the threat
that India might “internationalize” the bilateral border dispute by canvassing
its actual and would-be allies for support on the issue, perhaps even to the
extent of going tit-for-tat with Japan i.e. India backing Japan on the issue of
Senkaku sovereignty in return for Japanese aid and comfort on AP.

However, for the time being it looks like Japan—like the Asian Development Bank, which ran
into a PRC buzzsaw when it tried to put an Arunachal Pradesh hydropower project
on its agenda in 2009—is not quite ready to mix it up on AP.

Let’s unpack the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

Arunachal Pradesh is a region controlled by India in its northeast
quadrant, between Bhutan and Burma, home to a variety of ethnic groups.One of those groups is Tibetan, centered on
the town and district of Tawang in the western end of AP at the border with
Bhutan.

The Arunachal Pradesh dispute is bookended with Aksai Chin, a
blasted desert between India and the PRC in the northwest that is controlled by
the PRC.The Indian claim to Aksai Chin
is not terribly robust, since it is based on an internal British Indian
survey—the Johnson Line—which was never discussed or agreed with China.The PRC built a strategic road across Aksai
Chin in the 1950s, and it took several years for the Indian government to even
find out it was there.

There is a third slice of disputed territory, the “Trans-Karakorum Tract”
bordering Kashmir, geographically distinct from Aksai Chin, which India claims
Pakistan illegally ceded to the PRC in a land swap.For some reason, the PRC and India aren’t
arguing about this piece.

Both Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin territories have been openly
disputed since before the 1962 Sino-Indian war.The PRC has at times offered a grand bargain in which the two sides
acknowledge each other’s regions of effective control, by which India got AP
and the PRC gets AC.

The official Indian response has been Nothing Doing and all territory it
lost in the 1962 war must be recovered i.e. Aksai Chin is not negotiable.It has decoupled the two issues, and has
focused its diplomacy on the insistence that its sovereignty over AP be
confirmed.

India’s claim to AP is complicated in an interesting way.

In 1914, Great Britain was interested in creating an autonomous Tibetan
buffer—“Outer Tibet”—between British India and Russia/China.To this end, Sir Henry McMahon, the Foreign
Minister of British India, invited Tibetan and Republic of China delegates to the
Indian town of Simla.

Tibet, eager to be acknowledged as an autonomous power with its own
rights to negotiate directly with foreign powers (and not just through China),
generously conceded a delineation of Lhasa’s sphere of control—the McMahon Line--alienating Tawang, a market town that interested the Raj, to British India.

However, the Simla Agreement was negotiated between the Tibetan and
British representatives in a provisional sort of way after the Chinese
representatives had packed up and left.Since Britain’s Foreign Office was protective of its China diplomacy and
not interested in encouraging Tibetan pretensions to negotiate as an
independent sovereign power, the absence of the Chinese representatives—and without a
Chinese endorsement of the border arrangement accepted by the Tibetan
authorities--was a dealbreaker.

The Simla Agreement was apparently treated as an aspirational document
and was recorded in the most authoritative compendium of British Indian treaties,
Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison's Collection of Treaties, Engagements,
and Sanads, with the notation that neither Great Britain nor China had ratified the
treaty. China, indeed, never accepted the McMahon Line. Since Tibet wasn’t recognized as
a sovereign power, whatever it hoped to achieve with the Simla Accord—and what
it had tried to give away, namely Tawang-- was, in the eyes of the British,
moot.

Things puttered along until 1935, when the detention of a British spy in
Tawang by Tibetan authorities awakened the cupidity of a diplomat in the
Foreign Office of British India, Olaf Caroe.

Caroe checked the files, found that Great Britain had no ratified claims
on Tawang, and decided to amend and improve the record.

He arranged for the relevant original volume of the 1929 Aitchison
compendium to be withdrawn from the various libraries in which it was filed, discarded,
and replaced with a new version—but one that still claimed to be compiled in
1929, thereby removing the need for awkward explanations or documentation
concerning why the switch had happened.The
spurious version claimed that Tibet and Britain
had accepted the treaty. Thereby, the unsurveyed McMahon Line was repurposed as a sacrosanct British imperial border, and Tawang was slotted into the British Indian side of the ledger.

The deception was only discovered in 1964, when a researcher was able to
compare one of the last three surviving copies of the original compendium, at
Harvard University, with the spurious replacement.

Unfortunately, that was too late for Nehru, who staked his security
strategy and his diplomatic exchanges with China to a significant extent on the
fallacy that he had inherited from British India a clear and unequivocal claim
to its borders.

In 1962 Nehru decided to move up military units to assert India’s claim
to contested territory in Ladakh/Aksai Chin and in Arunachal
Pradesh under a gambit optimistically named The
Forward Policy.Unluckily for Nehru, Chairman Mao was itching to stick it to India’s patron, Nikita
Khrushchev, and the PLA attacked with overwhelming force on both fronts. India’s entire
strategy had been predicated on the assumption that the PRC would not respond
(shades, I think, of Western confidence that Vladimir Putin would stay his hand
in eastern Ukraine out of fear of sanctions and the wrath of his impoverished
and disgruntled oligarchs) and the Indian Army, outnumbered, undersupplied, and
disorganized, was completely unprepared for a desperate fight on the remote, high altitude battlefields.

India suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the PLA.After its victory, the PRC decided to take
the high ground, diplomatically as well as geographically. It withdrew its
forces to behind the McMahon Line and offered negotiations of the boundaries based on the status quo, in other words a de facto swap of AP for AC.

No dice, as we have seen.India
clearly does not see any need to credit Arunachal Pradesh—territory that the PRC abandoned—as
any kind of bargaining chip concerning Aksai Chin.This is, perhaps, a cautionary tale to the
PRC as to the geostrategic minuses as well as pluses of trying to behave like
Mr. Nice Guy.

This history is officially persona non grata in India.The report the Indian government commissioned
on the 1962 war—the Henderson Brooks Report--was so devastating to India’s
position and its legal, military, and diplomatic pretensions it was promptly
banned and publication is forbidden to this day.In an ironic recapitulation of the case of
the Aitchison compendium, it was assumed that there were only two typewritten
copies and they were securely buttoned up in safes in New Delhi.However, the Times of London correspondent, Neville Maxwell, promptly got his hands on a
copy and used it to write an expose on the tragedy of errors in 1962, India’s China War, thereby earning
himself the fierce hatred of generations of Indian nationalists.

Maxwell tried several times to put the report into the public domain.

As quoted in Outlook India, Maxwell provided an interesting account
of how the freedom of expression sausage gets made when the information
involved is not necessarily a matter of national security (the report is
classified Top Secret, but its content—the minutiae of military decisions and movements fifty years ago--has no current strategic or tactical significance) but is a
matter of supreme political embarrassment (to Nehru, the Congress Party, the
Gandhi political dynasty, and to the army).

My first attempt to
put the Report itself on the public record was indirect and low-key: after I
retired from the University I donated my copy to Oxford’s Bodleian Library,
where, I thought, it could be studied in a setting of scholarly calm. The
Library initially welcomed it as a valuable contribution in that “grey area”
between actions and printed books, in which I had given them material
previously. But after some months the librarian to whom I had entrusted it
warned me that, under a new regulation, before the Report was put on to the
shelves and opened to the public it would have to be cleared by the British
government with the government which might be adversely interested! Shocked by
that admission of a secret process of censorship to which the Bodleian had
supinely acceded I protested to the head Librarian, then an American, but
received no response. Fortunately I was able to retrieve my donation before the
Indian High Commission in London was alerted in the Bodleian’s procedures and
was perhaps given the Report.

In 2002, noting that all attempts in India to make the government release the
Report had failed, I decided on a more direct approach and made the text
available to the editors of three of India’s leading publications, asking that
they observe the usual journalistic practice of keeping their source to
themselves. … To my surprise the editors concerned decided, unanimously, not to
publish… Later I gave the text to a fourth editor and offered it to a fifth,
with the same nil result.

Narendra Modi, a determined foe of the Congress Party and the Gandhis (I
had to chuckle when I read these fawningarticles about President Obama bonding with Prime Minister Modi over their shared Gandhi love, despite the awkward fact that Modi's Hindutva movement was and apparently still is the spiritual
home of Gandhi’s assassin), came to power promising to release the report...but didn’t.And when Maxwell finally posted part of the report on
his website in 2014, the site was symbolically blocked.

Here is a link to a scan of Maxwell’s copy of the Henderson Brooks
report..

The Indian army, in particular, is wedded to a creation myth of PRC
perfidy that is infinitely more utile than acknowledging that the PLA attack,
rather than unprovoked, was a response to a strategically and diplomatically
bankrupt Indian border gambit compounded by non-stop miscues by India’s
civilian leadership and disastrous defeat for its military forces. This default presumption of Chinese aggression against innocent India, which is still widely accepted in India and abroad, also makes it easy for India to impose its narrative on murky matters like the Ladakh incidents of 2013 and 2014--clashes which, when viewed through the lens of 1962, invite the speculation that India has not abandoned its border-pushing ways.

In 2005, the PRC and India started negotiations over the borders
issue.Here’s a nice explainerfrom the
Daily Mail! in 2013 which signals that Aksai Chin might be on the table, but
Tawang is off the table, and unfortunately omits the significant complication
of the Caroe forgery.

India’s move into Arunachal Pradesh in the 1950s is less than a slam dunk
according to international law, complicated in particular by the issue of
Tawang.

Not only is there the problem of the shakiness of the McMahon line, highlighted by Olaf Caroe’s bibliographic hijinks,
there is the awkward fact that India forcefully displaced Tibetan theocratic
rule in Tawang—nominally rule from Lhasa, actually local rule by the immensely
powerful monastery.

Lhasa had apparently experienced cartographic remorse over Simla and
implored India to recognize Tawang as Tibetan territory in 1947.Instead, India seized the district in 1951 in
a quasi-official/quasi-military “liberating the Tibetan serfs” operation rather
similar to what the PRC conducted in its part of Tibet.

In recent years, the Dalai Lama has been forced into the unpleasant
position of affirming Indian sovereignty over Tawang, whose great monastery (the
second largest in Tibetan Buddhism) first gave him shelter when he fled PRC
control in 1959, and which had hosted the reincarnation of the 6th
Dalai Lama way back when.

The Dalai Lama apparently verbally acknowledged, if not in writing, that AP and Tawang belonged to
India on a couple occasions while he still served at the apex of power in the
Tibetan government in exile (a position he relinquished in 2011).

However, I assume twisting the Dalai Lama’s arm to concede Indian
sovereignty over Tawang falls a little bit short, since the Tibetan
government-in-exile lacks international recognition (and with it the right to
cede territory to India).

The PRC is happy to harp on Tawang’s role in the AP situation, since it
serves as a continual reminder that India is occupying territory in AP that,
however you slice it, is a core component of the Tibetan homeland, thereby
keeping alive a non-Indian or, if you want, a PRC-cum-Tibet claim to at least
part of the region and attempting to balk India’s attempt to claim full
sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh under international law.

My personal opinion is that the PRC is in no hurry to unfreeze the
conflict over Arunachal Pradesh, and its insistence on sovereignty over
Tawang—a district, I suspect, that has extremely limited interest in
reunification with the Chinese motherland—is something of a pretext.

With the Simla Agreement tainted and no subsequent cession of Tawang by
Tibet or China, the Indian position in Tawang is embarrassingly similar to that
of the PRC in the matter of its seizure of the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 i.e. having expelled the previous rulers by conquest and achieved control of the territory without attaining
international recognition of its sovereignty.And it’s somewhat similar to the Senkakus, where the United States
effectively surrendered its sovereignty over the islands when it returned
Okinawa and the Ryukyus to Japan, but didn’t cede its claim to anybody else.

Maybe Arunachal Pradesh is another one of those Mexican-standoff
situations like Kashmir vs. Tibet (a.k.a. the Indian temptation to make
mischief in the ethnic-Tibetan areas of the PRC is inhibited by concern that
the PRC, via Pakistan, might light the fuse in Kashmir).The PRC keeps the Tawang/AP issue alive to
forestall thoughts by India of giving aid and comfort to Japan on the Senkakus
or, for that matter, Vietnam on the Paracels.

Both the PRC and India are bulking up their infrastructure and military
on their respective sides of the de facto McMahon-Line-based border, making it
a virtual certainty that India will never alienate any part of AP, including
Tawang.

That’s good news for reduced actual tensions (as opposed to defense
ministry posturing) at the shared border, but India’s heightened sense of
security concerning Arunachal Pradesh may encourage it to be less tentative vis
a vis the PRC in its Japanese and Vietnamese diplomacy.

So, paradoxically, greater security along the PRC-Indian border may lead
to greater insecurity elsewhere.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

I highly recommend Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn
of a New America.Reading it in the
context of Ferguson, Garner, etc. this book really f*cked me up, as they say
nowadays.Based on my experience, I’d
recommend just picking up the book and reading it, without googling “Groveland
Boys” or looking at some reviews of the book.All I can say is that, despite that determinedly sunny subtitle, it will
take you into some very dark places.

Actually, what I will say is that the book also offers some
more fascinating insights into the relationship between J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and
the civil rights movement.As I wrote in
a previous post, “Everybody Wants Their Own Stasi,” Hoover disliked and distrusted
Martin Luther King as a troublemaker and, possibly, a communist asset.One of the worst abuses of the FBI was the
campaign of illegal wiretaps and bugging against King and his inner circular
conducted at the behest of the Kennedys.It culminated in the infamous “suicide letter”
prepared by the FBI and mailed to King’s
home (not at the behest of the Kennedys, I should point out).

On the other hand, when pressed by LBJ, Hoover devoted massive resources to breaking the
Mississippi Burning case and went on to destroy the Mississippi KKK with considerable efficiency
and apparent enthusiasm.

Devil in the Grove
provides some useful context.In the
1950s the NAACP’s strategy for attacking Jim Crow in the south was to
federalize the legal issues, using the appeals process to pull the most
egregious cases out of the racist local courts and carry them through the appellate
courts and, if necessary/possible, before the relatively sympathetic Supreme
Court.The Justice Department, including
the FBI, was often a significant adjunct to this process, providing federal
investigators to gather exculpatory evidence in NAACP Legal Defense Fund cases
that local law enforcement, usually riddled with KKK members and sometimes too
cowed and incompetent to do their jobs, had ignored or suppressed or worse.

The NAACP, and Thurgood Marshall in particular, were
sedulous in courting the FBI and endorsing, encouraging, and actively
supporting J. Edgar Hoover’s highest priority/obsession: his jihad against
communist subversion.

And J. Edgar Hoover, as long as he was confident that
inserting the FBI into southern civil rights cases would not “embarrass the
Bureau”, particularly by involving the FBI in cases which threatened to terminate
with humiliating defeats in local courts, was willing to oblige the NAACP.

I haven’t read up on the full history of the NAACP or
Marshall, so I’m not in a position to tease out how much of their
anti-communism was strategic (reflecting the need for rock-solid federal
backing), political (the NAACP competed with a communist-penetrated
organization, the Civil Rights Congress, for leadership in the black civil
rights struggle), or deeply-held ideology.

All I can say is, after a bumpy start, in the late 1940s and
1950s the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall assiduously stroked J. Edgar Hoover on
the anti-communism issue, and J. Edgar Hoover was generally sympathetic to the
NAACP and its need for federal agents to assist in the investigation of crimes
in the Jim Crow South.

Devil in the Grove
provides some examples:

In April 1947, putting
together an NAACP anticommunism position pamphlet, [NAACP president Walter]
White requested a patriotic encomium from J. Edgar Hoover, who replied that it
would be his “pleasure”. [pp. 111-112]

…

Early in the summer of
1950 [with nationwide desegregation of public education now seen as an
achievable goal—ed]…Marshall and the board of the NAACP found it necessary to
pass and adopt an anticommunist resolution, which directed the organization’s
leaders to “eradicate Communists from its branch units.”…Marshall took special
delight in trumping the political maneuvers of the NAACP’s communist
wing…Marshall could…boast, “we socked them good”…The executive staff and
majority delegates of the NAACP had in fact socked the communists good on
virtually every resolution they’d brought to the convention floor in 1950.They walked out in frustration “and never
came back,” said Marshall, whose management of the communist issue…earned him
an oral commendation from J. Edgar Hoover.[pp. 205-207]

…

[On one occasion,
Marshall was embarrassed that an informant with communist ties whom he had
introduced to the FBI had found disfavor with the Bureau...]While Kennedy’s communist affiliations hardly
bore upon the case, they provided Marshall, in his dismissal of the writer’s presumed
scoops, with the opportunity to affect solidarity with the FBI.As always, Marshall expressed his
appreciation for the bureau’s efforts…In return, he was thanked “for his
appreciation of confidence in the work of this Bureau…”Once again, Hoover and Marshall performed
their private rites of cooperation. [261]

Remarkably, the relationship between Thurgood Marshall and
Martin Luther King, two civil rights icons, does not seem to have been any closer or sympathetic than the ties between Marshall and J. Edgar Hoover.

Readers can judge for themselves, with this excerpt from
interviews recorded by Marshall’s biographer, Juan Williams:

Q: Did
(Hoover) fear that King was a communist?A:
He just had an absolute blur on communism. It's unbelievable. I don't know what
happened to him, I don't know what happened but something happened. No, it was
personal. He bugged everything King had. Everything. And the guy that did it
was a friend of a private detective in New York who's a good friend of mine,
Buck Owens. He called up and said, Buck, do you know Martin Luther King?
And he said, no. He said do you know anybody that goes? He said yes. He said
well you please tell him, don't use my name but I'm in the group that's bugging
everything he's got. Even when he goes to the toilet. I mean we've bugged
everything and I think it's a dirty damn trick and he ought to know about it. So Buck called
me and I called Brother King. He was in Atlanta then. And I told him about it
and he said, oh forget it, nothing to it. Just didn't interest him. That's what
he said. He didn't care, no. Q: How
do you interpret that? A:
I don't and I've never been able to. That he wasn't doing anything wrong. Well
they ain't nobody who can say that. Right. Right. And
when I called him up and told him that his house was bugged and all, he said so
what? Doesn't bother me. That's what he said.Q: Did
you guys know about all this sex stuff that they talk about these days?A:
I knew that the stories were out. And I knew who was putting them out.Q: Mr.
Hoover?A:
No, it was a private police business. They used to settle strikes and
everything. [Pinkertons] I'm not saying whether, I don't know, I don't know
whether he was right or Hoover was right. I don't know which one was right.Q: What
did you think about the fact that he didn't care about being bugged?A:
Well, the answer was simple. I don't know if a man can humanly do all the
things. Five and six times a night with five and six different women. We add it
all up, I mean he just couldn't be all them places at the same time. I don't
believe in it personally. But I don't know, when I was solicitor general, a lot
of things came by, arguments between the attorney general and the director of
the FBI and I, by internal rules, had to get copies of all of it. And we had to
have a special safe and I know that of all the things that I listened to and
read, I never found Mr. Hoover to have lied once. Not once. I don't know, I'm
not saying he always told the truth - Q: You
never found him to have lied?A:
That's right. I mean he was never proved to be a liar. He always came up with
the right stuff, usually it would be a taped thing. You can tell by the tape. I
don't know. But that's between him and, I think the only way to do it would be
him and King and put 'em in the same room. And it's too late to do that.

Marshall’s remarks support Tim Weiner’s portrait of Hoover
in Enemies as an unnervingly astute
and capable bureaucrat who effectively performed his impossible
mission—navigating between the conflicting demands of the Constitution for
civil liberties and the Executive Branch for universal intelligence—with marked
success for five decades…

…perhaps as astutely and capably as Marshall shrank the grey
areas between the Constitution, state law, and justice in his epic struggle for
civil rights.

Hoover and Marshalls were two insiders “present at the
creation”, their exalted status and power the result of a hard-won, superior
understanding of the contradictions and potentialities of American government
as it is.

Contrast with Marshall’s dismissive attitude toward King and
Jesse Jackson:

Who made Jesse Jackson? The press.
Who made Martin Luther King? The press, they do it. Because it writes good, it
writes well. And you know Martin Luther King didn't have a publicity person. No
sir. The press did it all. The press did it all.

Reading Marshall’s account of his
awkward exchange with King over the surveillance issue, I find it hard to
believe that King’s reaction to the intense surveillance was really “oh forget it,
nothing to it. Just didn't interest him...He didn't care, no.”

I have a feeling King didn’t really
feel that way.Maybe what he was
thinking, “Marshall, he’s close to Hoover.I’m not going to let it get back to Hoover that I’m upset or afraid.That’s what he wants.”

At the time of the King surveillance, Marshall was serving
as an appellate court judge; the next year LBJ appointed him Solicitor General
and, in 1967 nominated Marshall for a seat on the Supreme Court.

In other words, King, the
evangelical populist was not on the same page with Marshall, and Marshall, whom
I would characterize as the black cardinal in the high church of America’s deep
state, perhaps found himself somewhat more at home in the company of its Grand
Inquisitor, J. Edgar Hoover.